The System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle

by Neal Stephenson

  “There’s a hole in that hypothesis, Doc. Why’d such a cull want to rake through the mouse-eaten leavings of a dead Vertuoso?”

  “Ignorant men have fanciful notions of what may be found in such residue. Alchemists frequently work with gold. Perhaps—”

  “Still, the hypothesis does not hold up well under close examination.”

  “I agree!” said Daniel, exasperated. “I no longer believe in it.”

  “Well, now is a fine time to say so,” said Saturn. “What’s the new hypothesis?”

  “That the buyer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, or else has made a close study of the Society’s early years. He knows a great deal about Hooke and about the Real Character, and…” Daniel paused.

  “And?”

  “And about poison,” Daniel said. “An attempt was recently made on the life of Princess Caroline. The weapon was a poniard smeared with nicotine, excellently prepared.”

  “Bloody peculiar,” reflected Peter Hoxton, “when this benighted world doth so abound in simpler means of killing.”

  “During the ’sixties—Hooke’s heyday, and the æra of the Real Character—several Fellows of the Royal Society took an interest in nicotine.”

  “It’s obvious then, isn’t it?” Saturn said.

  “What is obvious?”

  “The villain must be Sir Christopher Wren!” Saturn clearly meant this as a preposterous jest, and so he was appalled to see Daniel considering it seriously. “Because he is one of the very few still living from that æra, you mean,” Daniel finally said. “It is a good thought. But no. This is not being done by Wren, or Halley, or Roger Comstock, or any of the others who were in the Royal Society in those days. Supposing I wanted to kill someone—would I brew up nicotine? No. No, Peter, this is being done by someone of a more recent generation. He has conceived a diseased Fascination with the Royal Society of the 1660s. He has poured an unhealthy amount of time into studying what we did, and reading our annals.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? When a young man falls under the spell of a particular young woman, and will not leave her alone, though her father and brothers menace him with daggers drawn, ask you why?”

  “But this is different.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Trust me, ’tis different. The buyer desires something. I believe you know what the something is. Will you please let me in on the secret?”

  “I have held it back, not because I wish to keep secrets from you,” Daniel sighed, “but because I find the entire subject painfully embarrassing. The buyer seeks the Philosopher’s Stone.”

  Saturn slapped his forehead theatrically. “Why’d I even take the trouble to ask?”

  “He has heard at least part of the story about the man who died in Bedlam when Hooke cut him for the stone, and who was (some would say) resurrected by the elixir of Enoch Root.”

  “Ah, that is the name of—?”

  “Of the Alchemist in that story, yes. If you are the sort of chap who believes in Alchemy, then it is implicit, in that story, that the elixir must have been made using something akin to the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, according to the lore of the Alchemists, that Stone is made by combining the Philosophic Mercury with the Philosophic Sulphur. Where, might you ask, does a bloke get his hands on such ingredients? The answers are many and various, depending on which Alchemist you talk to. But many believe that King Solomon was an Alchemist, who knew how to get, or to make, the Philosophic Mercury, and who used it to turn lead into gold.”

  “Ah, that would explain why he was so rich!”

  “Just so. Now, the story goes that if you could find some of King Solomon’s gold and put it in a crucible, you could extract from it minute traces of the Philosophic Mercury. I believe that our buyer somehow got wind of this yarn about the Alchemical Resurrection in Bedlam twenty-five years ago, and reckoned that the shortest and quickest way for him to get his hands on a sample of the Philosophic Mercury was—”

  “To ransack London for Hooke’s old notes and knick-knacks.”

  “Yes. Now, consider that, when I got back to London at the end of January, the first thing I did was to begin searching for Hooke’s old notes and equipment. Arlanc was the first man I questioned. He must have mentioned this to his contact in Jack’s organization. Shortly, word must have got round to our buyer.”

  “Who was already disposed to believe that this thing of infinite value had been hidden away, somewhere, by Hooke.”

  “Yes. Imagine the effect the news must have had upon him!”

  “He must have been frantic,” Saturn said, “believing that you were in quest of the same goods, and would get to them first.”

  “Indeed. As we now know, this led to the series of burglaries. I had only a dim and fragmentary understanding of these matters until a fortnight ago, when we found that document in the wall at Bedlam. Then all became clear. But, too, it was clear that the buyer’s search was doomed to failure, for Hooke’s receipt mentions a certain ingredient without offering any explanation of how to obtain it. For that reason, the document was useless as bait for the Stake-out.”

  “Which is why you and Sir Isaac had to produce the fake.”

  “The fake, and the box that it came in,” Daniel said. “The buyer believes that a small amount of the Solomonic Gold is locked in the compartment in the bottom of that chest.”

  “Not for long,” Saturn remarked. He was gazing fixedly out the window.

  “Why do you say so?”

  “Because Sean Partry is waving his arms at me from below the Window in Question.”

  Daniel’s arm jerked and spilt his ink-bottle. It slicked the page of the log-book with a black parabola that streamed over the edge and spattered to the floor.

  Saturn was on his feet. He waved back, but did not take his eye off the Tatler-Lock.

  “Which direction is Partry indicating?” Daniel asked backing carefully away from the mess. The ink had already found a crevice between floor-planks. Sounds of havoc and dismay were coming up from the tap-room.

  “He points toward the Bridge,” said Saturn, and finally glanced away from Partry so that he could give his watch a study.

  “Then the buyer ought to be coming our way—”

  “In no more than two minutes,” Saturn agreed. “But traffic is heavier now than when I clocked him before. I shall loap along the Bridge a-foot, and may out-pace him. Do you try to summon a hackney, or a sedan.” And he preceded Daniel out the door, and down stairs. Which was fortunate for Daniel, as several ink-spattered Main-Topp patrons had by now formed up at the base of the stairs, in a retaliatory mood. Their ardor cooled when Saturn sallied forth, and through the little Mobb broke a path that Daniel was not slow to follow. “Our work above is concluded,” Saturn announced, over his shoulder, as he went out, “and all losses shall be compensated anon—but not now.” And with that he burst out the front door of the Main-Topp and into the streaming crowd of the Bridge.

  Saturn glanced left—towards Southwark and the Tatler-Lock—but turned right, anticipating that the buyer’s carriage would overtake him presently. By the time Daniel made it out the door, Saturn had already advanced several long strides in the direction of London. Daniel followed his example and glanced left—but it availed him nothing. He lacked both Peter Hoxton’s height, which would have enabled him to see over the crowd as far as the Great Stone Gate, and his youth, which made eyes quicker to adjust to the sudden brightness of the unroofed street.

  All he had was a vague instruction to hire a coach or a sedan. No hackney of sound mind would await customers in front of the Main-Topp. Daniel guessed there might be chairs or coaches for hire in the Square, a short distance to the north. So he turned right, and began to thread his way through the jostling crowd.

  Like the captain of a brittle ship hemmed in on all sides by massive ice-floes, Daniel could not make his own path, but had to move along with the general flow, and avail himself of any leads that snaked open before him before they drew shu
t and crushed his ribs. He made feeble progress compared to Saturn. Before he had progressed so far as the vault of the Chapel, he had lost sight of Saturn’s black head.

  The artificial isles that supported the Bridge were called Starlings; the chutes between the Starlings, through which the divided River coursed, were denominated Locks. Daniel, unable to see much but heads and shoulders, estimated, by a kind of dead reckoning, that he must be passing over Long Entry Lock, which was the narrowest, hence most dangerous of them all, as the Chapel Pier to its north side had grown so fat over the centuries as to nearly pinch it shut. Then, looking up, he saw a stone vault overhead, and knew he was passing under the Chapel. Next (counting the Locks and Starlings in his head, like a Papist going through the Rosary) would be Chapel Lock—also quite narrow—but then St. Mary’s Lock, one of the widest on the whole bridge, hence, popular among watermen. Directly over St. Mary’s was the open fire-break called The Square. And it was there, Daniel reasoned, that hackney-drivers and sedan-porters would flock in hopes of swopping passengers with the watermen below.

  Such was his plan. But as commonly happened to clever Natural Philosophers who have hatched elaborate schemes, he was overtaken by simple events. The crowd, hemmed in under the vault of the Chapel, suddenly pressed him from all sides. It was like being an atom of a gas in Boyle’s Rarefying Engine when the piston was slammed down by a terrific weight. A carriage was trying to force its way through—and succeeding. The crowd, sensing danger not so much from the carriage itself as from its bow-wave of panic, surged out from the dangerous confines of the vault, and Daniel, like a wine-cork tossed into Long Entry Lock, was spewed forth.

  He was in the open now, tottering, looking about warily lest some eddy of the Mobb-rush take him unawares and crush him against a store-front. So he saw the carriage that had caused the trouble as it emerged from the vault, pressing on toward London.

  He did not doubt that this was the one. Its window-curtains had all been drawn and its driver had evidently been paid to force his way to the other end of the Bridge with no concern for life, limb, or liability.

  They were over Chapel Lock. The Square was only ten yards farther along—but this hackney had already passed Daniel by, and at its mad pace would soon overtake Saturn as well. Daniel still nursed some hope that he might be able to summon a carriage or a chair in the Square—but it would not be easy to persuade a strange driver to light out in hot pursuit of a hackney being driven as recklessly as this one. They needed to keep the buyer in sight as long as they possibly could; for there was no way of telling how long he would wait to put the key he had just paid for into the key-hole in the bottom of the chest, and turn it.

  Daniel had, by default, staggered into the sudden open space left in the wake of the hackney. He was so close that he almost could have reached out and climbed aboard, if he’d been that spry. So he could hear—or so he phant’sied—a muffled pop from within, like a musket misfiring. Then flickering light shone through the curtains, and he heard from within a man shouting “Sacré bleu!”

  Without being aware of how fast he was moving—for if anyone had asked, he’d have insisted he was too old to run—Daniel had followed the hackney right into the Square. The way widened slightly here. He saw Saturn standing to one side. He’d been conversing with a sedan-porter, but had broken off to stare at the buyer’s hackney.

  Indeed many were now staring at it, for it was smoking. And it was making booms as the passenger flailed against the roof, signalling the driver to stop. The door on the right side flew open and disgorged a cloud of brown-gray smoke. So dense and voluminous was this, that a long and careful inspection was needed to see that there was a man in the middle of it. He was staggering away from the carriage, headed for the parapet that surrounded the Square to limit the number of pedestrians who toppled into St. Mary’s Lock. The passenger looked like a figure from Ovid: a Cloud metamorphosing into a Man. For the smoke had saturated the long hooded cloak that he wore, and was still billowing out of it. Gagging, he shuffled toward the parapet. The hackney-driver scrambled round to the open door, probed into the smoke with his whip-handle, and after a bit of scratching about, dragged out a blackened carapace: a burnt box, still sputtering and jetting a sturdy plume of thick yellowish smoke. Its lid was open to reveal a sheaf of pages, still legible though they’d been burnt to gray leaves of ash; these tumbled onto the pavement and Daniel, only a fathom away, saw the angular glyphs of the Real Character. But then he turned his attention back to the buyer, who had finally cast off his raiment of smoke, and stood at the parapet, feet spread wide, hands planted to support him as he retched into St. Mary’s Lock. Like a monk or wizard out of medieval times he looked in that robe. Then he was joined by a larger man who stepped in from the left and clapped his right hand on the other’s left shoulder.

  The response of the hooded man was immediate—too quick for Daniel, who had a foreboding of what was about to happen, to shout a warning. The hooded man spun toward Saturn, pivoting around the shoulder that Saturn had gripped. Much was hidden by the robe and by smoke; but the movements of his shoulders told that he was driving his right hand toward Saturn’s belly.

  But Peter Hoxton, by luck or by foresight, was ready for this. There had been something in the man’s stance at the parapet that had looked posed, and poised: perhaps it had roused in Saturn’s mind the same suspicions as in Daniel’s. Saturn got his left arm well inside of the other’s attack, and shouldered it aside. But then he jumped back. For as was now plain to everyone in the Square, the robed man was holding a small dagger in his hand. And as was clear to Daniel and to Saturn, the blade had been smeared with something.

  In this brief melee the hood had fallen from the buyer’s head to reveal his face. It was not burnt or pox-marked. On the contrary, it was a well-formed head of noble bearing. He had black hair going silver, and a goatee. That much was obvious as he surveyed the crowd on the Square, which had formed a ring around him and Saturn, well beyond dagger-range. Daniel recognized him (though it took a few moments) as Édouard de Gex.

  De Gex made a move toward the parapet. Saturn, not very prudently, reached out and grabbed him. That stopped de Gex in his tracks. Or so it seemed for an instant until Daniel stepped forward through a shoal of smoke and perceived that de Gex had gone over the edge into St. Mary’s Lock, leaving Saturn standing there alone, holding an empty robe.

  *Partry.

  Royal Society, Crane Court

  24 JULY 1714

  “WHEN I WAS A BOY, traveling the roads of France with my father—may God have mercy on his soul—and my brother Calvin, we would from time to time overtake a traveling knife-grinder, sweating with the labor of shoving his rig, which was very heavy because of the massive round grindstone. My father, God rest him, was a trader. A merchant. Everything he needed to conduct his business he carried in his head, or in his purse. This Calvin and I considered to be the normal state of affairs. How strange it was, therefore, to see these knife-sharpeners, who could not earn their bread without a great heavy stone! One day Father heard me and Calvin make some mocking comments after we had passed one of these poor hard-working men. He chided us for our arrogance, and gave us a lesson: the grindstone was set in motion by a shove, and kept turning by occasional slaps of the grinder’s hand. If it lacked weight, it would run down so quickly as to be useless. But because of its tremendous mass, it continued to turn with the greatest impetuosity once set in motion. The stone acted, my father said, as a sort of banca, storing up the work that the grinder did sporadically with hand-slaps, and releasing it steadily. This faculty was so essential to the knife-grinder’s work that he willingly pushed that heavy stone up and down hills every day of his life, like Sisyphus.

  “When Jack Shaftoe came back to London, he had in his pocket some money given him by the King of France to finance certain schemes and intrigues that Jack was supposed to set afoot here. And, too, there was the promise that more money would be sent to Jack from time to time if Le Roi was pl
eased with his work. The gold he had in his pocket was like the first great shove that sets the grindstone in motion, and the sums promised later would be like the hand-slaps that keep it from losing its speed. But Jack had the wit to understand that he needed a banca, a store-house of wealth and power in London, so that his operations would run smooth and steady, even when the subsidies were balky and sporadic. It was not possible for him to rely upon proper bancas, and so he had to create one of his own, tailored to his designs. Making the acquaintance of a Mr. Knockmealdown—who in those days was a modestly successful fence, running a Lock in Limehouse, buying goods that had been rifled from ships by mudlarks—he offered up the following Proposition: that he, Jack Shaftoe, would use his ‘French gold and English wits’ to make Mr. Knockmealdown into a Colossus among receivers, vastly expanding his holdings, and building up his inventory. Mr. Knockmealdown would become a rich man, and his Irish East London Company, as ’twas waggishly called, would become, for Jack, the grindstone that would store up the produce of his labours.

  “For the first several years that Jack was back in London, he applied himself to little else. And his wisdom in doing so was demonstrated presently, when the War of the Spanish Succession began to go badly for France, what with all the great blows struck at the armies of Le Roi by Marlborough and Prince Eugene. You may be sure that Louis sent Jack very little gold in those grim years. Jack should have been reduced to the estate of a Vagabond, and been rendered useless to Le Roi, had he not been able to sustain himself from the profits of the East London Company. As it was, Jack prospered even as Louis declined, and by the time that Marlborough crushed the French at Ramillies, and stood poised to drive into the heart of France (or so it seemed), Jack had built Mr. Knockmealdown up into the most powerful Receiver in Christendom: a sort of Pirate-King, able to absorb into his warehouses the entire contents of a stolen ship as a dog swallows a fly, and, on the same tide, to load the same ship to the gunwales with swag. The East London Company thereby became the Foundation upon which Jack could build his dark Edifice. Only in recent years has he built it high enough for men such as you to note it; but you may be certain it was a-building for many a year before then.”